Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment. The FOSSology Project is a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project built around an open and modular architecture for analyzing software. Existing modules include license analysis, meta data extraction, and MIME type identification. This open source software tool analyzes a given set of software packages, and reports items such as the software licenses used by these packages.

More than simply reporting, “Package X uses license Y,” the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package. A single package may be labeled as “GPL” but contain files that use other licenses (BSD, OSL, or any of the hundreds of other licenses). Even if an exact license is unknown, the license may be identifiable by common license phrases.

The availability of free open-source usage data “will help people make much better– and affordable– decisions about what open source to use and not use,” Cote said.

Samba software is a free, open source implementation of networking protocols to share files between Windows and UNIX computers. This is a good news for Samba project.

Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.

Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007.

Andrew Tridgell, creator of Samba, said:

We are very pleased to be able to get access to the technical information necessary to continue to develop Samba as a Free Software project. Although we were disappointed the decision did not address the issue of patent claims over the protocols, it was a great achievement for the European Commission and for enforcement of antitrust laws in Europe. The agreement allows us to keep Samba up to date with recent changes in Microsoft Windows, and also helps other Free Software projects that need to interoperate with Windows